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About Me

I am a Ph.D. student at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion. I study the History of Biblical Interpretation, which includes Jewish and Christian interpretations of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament. My interests are religion, politics, TV, movies, and reading.

Wednesday, July 10, 2013

Nixon's Shadow 3

For my blog post today on Nixon's Shadow: The History of an Image,
I'd like to highlight something that David Greenberg says on page 44.
The context is the aftermath of Richard Nixon's 1946 run for U.S.
Congress, in which Nixon unseated incumbent Democrat Jerry Voorhis.

"Voorhis
alleged in 1947 that Nixon's minions had bullied shopkeepers, workers,
and newspaper editors into suppressing their support for him.
'Merchants were warned that if they dared to sign newspaper statements
in my support, as they had in previous campaigns, their line of credit
would be cut off at the bank. One large banking institution sent the
word 'down the line' that its employees were not to vote for Jerry
Voorhis.' The sole editor in the district who had previously supported
him, Voorhis added, 'was informed the next morning by his landlord that
he had read the editorial and the editor would have to 'get out.'"

That reminded me of something that John Bircher Gary Allen wrote in his book, Richard Nixon: The Man Behind the Mask. Allen referred to an article in the conservative publication Human Events
that said that, during the 1952 Republican National Convention, wealthy
bankers were trying to torpedo the candidacy of Republican Robert Taft
by threatening to call in the loans of pro-Taft delegates; their aim,
according to the article, was to preserve their cozy relationship with
the government through the New Deal, which Taft would threaten, but
which Dwight Eisenhower was open to keeping. Voorhis would probably
narrate his own situation differently: he would most likely say that the
wealthy bankers were against the New Deal, and so they preferred
Republican Richard Nixon over Jerry Voorhis, who was himself an ardent
New Dealer. Yet, assuming that what the Human Events article
and Voorhis say is true, it's disturbing that private interests were
using their control over the livelihoods of others to bully people into
retreating from the political arena. I think of something that a
poli-sci professor said more than once: that government is not the only
source of coercion.